John McWhorter studies how language has evolved -- and will evolve -- with social, historical and technological developments, in addition to studying and writing about race in America.

In recent work, he’s been urging grammarians to think of email and text messages not as the scourge of the English language but as “fingered speech,” a new form between writing and talking. These digital missives, despite their “shaggy construction,” represent an exciting new form of communication in which “lol” and “hey” are particles, he suggests, and written thoughts can be shared at the speed of talking. Should we worry that knowing how to parse "haha kk" means we'll lose the ability to read Proust? No, he told the TED Blog: "Generally there’s always been casual speech and formal speech, and people can keep the two in their heads."

McWhorter teaches at Columbia; he's a scholar at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at The New Republic and TheRoot.com. Among his books on language and on race, a selected list: What Language Is (And What It Isn't and What It Could Be); Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English; and Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.

Linguistics, Communication, TED, Music, Designers, Entrepreneurship, Mathematicians,